Salesforce to acquire SMS startup HeyWire

Salesforce is acquiring Massachusetts-based HeyWire—that develops, builds and deploys cloud-based messaging application for enterprises—for an undisclosed sum. The details of the deal have not been disclosed by either of the companies but Meredith Flynn Ripley, CEO, HeyWire and her team will join the CRM company, post-acquisition, to enhance customer engagement through conversational messaging within the Salesforce Service Cloud. However, the merger could be seen as a subsequent step of the partnership between both organizations which stemmed from, HeyWire’s claim of being the ‘Mobile messaging (platform) for Salesforce-powered business.’ It also hints at the growing importance of mobile messaging (read SMS) among the ways that businesses communicate with customers.

“As a member of the Salesforce ecosystem, we’ve witnessed first-hand Salesforce’s commitment to disrupting markets, we’ve seen the impact conversational messaging is making on our customers’ businesses and we’re thrilled with the opportunity to deliver innovative solutions in enterprise mobile messaging to Salesforce customers worldwide.” Flynn Ripley said in a company blogpost.

Acquisition Appetite

In what looks like an acquisition spree (amounting to a reported $4 billion this year), Salesforce’s scoop of HeyWire comes after an already, seemingly big acquisition timeline. Earlier, in June it had acquired Demandware for $2.8 billion to capture the multi-billion dollar digital commerce market. That was followed up by acquisition of data center optimization startup, Coolan. In August itself, Salesforce bought two other companies; Data analytics firm BeyondCore to aid its analytics cloud offerings and Quip that brought its collaborative productivity software suite along.